Chapter 6 situates the case studies of activism in Argentina and South Africa in global trends in LGBT rights and distills some general lessons from the research. It explores the implications of the book’s arguments for understanding LGBT activism in two additional national contexts that differ drastically in terms of LGBT legal inclusion: the Netherlands and Russia. The Dutch case illustrates additional applications of the book’s theory and the Russian case points to the limits of this study in underscoring contingency of identity deployment on the ability to express identity in public and to meet collectively in public and private spaces. The chapter then tackles the contemporary challenge of backlash against LGBT rights gains and considers how an intersectional approach to identity strategizing clarifies the stakes of some lesbians’ participation in anti-transgender mobilization. The chapter concludes with a reflection on directions for future research, including how the book’s framework can help scholars understand identity strategizing by movements in other national contexts.

This chapter introduces the book’s motivation: to understand how activists use identity to manage the apparent contradiction between the promises of legal inclusion and persistent forms of marginalization. The chapter illustrates the importance of the issue through discussion of the activism of two lesbian groups – Free Gender in Cape Town, South Africa, and La Fulana in Buenos Aires, Argentina – that form the focus on the book. Both organizations strategize sexual identity in tandem with other racial, class, and gender identities, albeit in different ways. The chapter presents the conceptual background of the book, which adopts a historical approach to understanding LGBT inclusion into citizenship and explains the relevance of intersectionality to contemporary LGBT organizing. The chapter previews the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 1 that accounts for key differences in how the two organizations strategically use multiple identities. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the methodological aspects of the research and presents the plan for the rest of the book.

Chapter 4 considers dilemmas that arise for “successful” LGBT movements with increasing access to and interactions with state bureaucracies. The chapter applies an intersectional lens to neoliberal inclusion to reveal how inclusion along one dimension (sexuality) may constrict organizations along other dimensions (access to resources), influencing the ability of organizations to deploy their identity strategies. The chapter first examines how, in Argentina, activists who took up salaried positions in the bureaucracy were able to deploy their strategy of lesbian visibility from within the state to advance pro-LGBT public policy. However, activists’ engagement with the state weakened the organization and compromised its ability to deploy its identity strategy in the public sphere. The chapter then contrasts this example of state engagement with Free Gender’s decisions in South Africa. Free Gender declined to participate in a major national initiative and chose instead to engage with local police and deploy its identity strategy in these interactions. The chapter concludes by drawing lessons about the consequences of neoliberal inclusion on LGBT organizations, specifically how it may limit their potential to effect change regardless of the choice organizations make to engage the state or not.